They will be developing practical knowledge by exploring a variety of materials and tools and discover elements and selected principles. Similarly, they will be developing ideas by investigating visual ideas in response to a variety of motivations, observations, and their imagination.
Next they will communicate and interpret their artwork by sharing the ideas, feelings, and stories communicated by their own and others’ objects and images.
After reading the 'Rainbow Fish' we discussed how illustrations are used in story books to enhance the story. We also talked about how elements of shape, line, colour, texture can create mood, or feelings during the story.
We explored different colours and their meanings in artwork, we went for a walk out in the playground and looked for and found different textures. The vocabulary that came from the texture hunt was fantastic and the students came up with soft, rough, hard, and smooth.
The class shared a variety of different textures of paper and materials that were soft, rough, hard and smooth to create fish scales for the rainbow fish artwork. This also gave the students another opportunity to use this new vocabulary.
Then Room 10 students learnt about background and foreground. By revisiting the Rainbow Fish story we looked at the backgrounds and foregrounds in the illustrations. What they found out was that the background in the illustrations changed from blue to green and it had white coming through these colours to represent sunlight. Also, they noticed that the foreground had seaweed, stones, coral and other animals in it.
Finally, the students painted different backgrounds on their artwork using a variety of brush strokes and used torn and cut paper to make their seaweed for the foreground.
Luka: We watched a video about Rainbow Fish and we had to glue the coloured paper onto our fish and these were the scales of the fish.
Chase: “We cut some smooth and rough paper for our fish scales and we coloured in the head and tail rainbow colours.
Aria: We learnt about different textures and how things are rough and smooth. We also painted our background and left some white showing to make it look like the illustrations in the book.
Kayleen: We learnt about foreground and background. In our artwork we left white showing on our background for sunlight and we put blue and green paper to make it look like seaweed at the front of our picture.
Keywords: New Zealand Curriculum, The Visual Arts, Texture, Foreground, Background, Literacy.
